Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
The explosion shook the Griffiths’ farmhouse. “It sounded like a ton of dynamite,” Annie Griffith said the next day. “My husband jumped from the bed and ran for the door. He saw the woods ablaze and hollered to me. All the treetops were on fire. You could see scattered blazes for about a mile around.”
Allen McKenzie, 19, and Janet Martinetti, 16, also felt the blast. They were driving home from a dance shortly before midnight when the explosion rocked the car. A second explosion followed. “(E)verything went up in the air,” McKenzie recalled the next day. “After that, we saw something floating down through the air. It was afire.”
Martinetti feared the worse. “I thought it was an atomic blast, the way it mushroomed,” she said. “Everything turned pink and orange. I told Allen not to look at it.” Her response was understandable. The date was Dec. 9, 1960, the heart of the Cold War — 60 years ago this week.
Though the incident happened in a pasture in Plainfield, reporters had no trouble finding witnesses the next day. For about 20 minutes before the explosion, people around Plainfield and nearby Barre had been hearing the ominous drone of a low-flying aircraft circling.
Annie Griffith, her husband, Peter, and son, Joseph, raced from their home and toward the flames that lit up the night. They were the first to reach the site of the devastation. During the night and early morning, however, more than 1,000 others would descend on the scene. There they would find wreckage from the crash of an enormous plane. The area reeked of aviation fuel and burning metal.
Upon impact, bits of the plane had been hurled in every direction. The plane’s massive tires and sections of metal sheared off branches and treetops. The plane created a 30-foot-deep crater and a 200-yard-long furrow as it ground to a halt. A large section of wing hung from a tree, as did bits of aluminum chaff, which was designed to disrupt enemy radar. Once the sun rose, the chaff sparkled like tinsel.
From what was left, it was clearly a military aircraft. But what had it been doing circling Barre before plowing into a pasture in Plainfield?
A hundred miles to the west, at about 4 a.m., several hours after the crash, a bedraggled man in an Air Force uniform walked up to the Kenneth Benson Motel in North Hudson, New York. The man was perhaps holding his ribs, three of which were broken, and favoring one shoulder — he had broken his collarbone. He asked to use the phone to call his wife.
“Hello, dear, I’m back on the ground,” he told her. Only after she asked when he would be home for breakfast did he mention that he had parachuted out of his bomber. The seven other men onboard were still missing.
The man, Major Karl Keyes, was the radar operator aboard the B-52 Stratofortress that had crashed in Plainfield. During his parachute jump, he had become snagged high in a tree in the wilderness near Mount Marcy. He had climbed down and hiked several hours out of the woods.
People at the crash site searched for survivors, fearing they would find bodies. They turned up three jackets, a life vest, a boot and part of a sock, but no other sign of the crew.
Vermont’s aeronautics commissioner, Edward Knapp, suspected that someone had been onboard when the plane crashed. “The fact that it flew over a heavy populated area and came down in an uninhabited spot makes me feel that someone was guiding it,” he said.
Barre Mayor George Estivill understood how close a call it had been. From evidence at the crash site, it was clear that the gigantic B-52 – 153 feet long, with a 185-foot wingspan — had been spiraling down toward Barre, and only seconds away, when it went down. He had his own theory about the cause of the near-miss. “(I)f there was no one aboard the plane, there was some greater being guiding it,” he said.
At 6:30 a.m., officials and security officers from the Air Force base in Plattsburgh, New York, arrived at the scene. With the help of Vermont State Police, they tried to seal the area. But seeing that hundreds had already tramped through the scene, they dropped the restriction.
During the day, other members of the flight crew began to emerge from the wilderness of upstate New York. Five were found in the Schroon Lake area. Most were in good condition, though one suffered a broken pelvis and internal injuries. Another crew member was found nearly two days after the crash, suffering from frostbite, also near Schroon Lake. They explained that the plane seemed to be on the verge of crashing when they ejected.
Only one crew member was still missing, 27-year-old Staff Sgt. Pierre Maheux of Auburn, Maine, the tail gunner. He had been the only one without an ejection seat, but the others believed he had managed to parachute out. Maheux was said to be an experienced outdoorsman who could survive in the wild.
The Air Force, as well as police on both sides of Lake Champlain, searched for the missing gunner. Tips poured in. A Waitsfield man reported seeing a flare in the sky on the morning after the crash. A Waitsfield woman said she had seen what seemed to be smoke signals coming from the Mad River Glen area. Someone reported seeing what appeared to be a parachute floating near the Champlain Bridge.
The search for Maheux, a married father of three, was called off the week before Christmas.
Immediately after the crash, Air Force officials allayed public fears that the plane had been carrying nuclear weapons. A Norwich University physics professor studied the site and found no radiation.
Still, government officials and Vermont newspapers were angry that an unmanned bomber could be allowed to fly roughly 100 miles and nearly crash into a city. They called for an investigation.
The bomber, based at Westover Air Force Base in Chicopee, Massachusetts, had been on a routine training mission over New York state when the trouble began. Initial reports from the crew indicated the bomber had been in distress — newspapers referred to it as the “burning” or “crippled” B-52 — when the crew bailed out.
But after the Air Force investigated, it attributed the crash to a series of human errors. Nothing had been wrong with the plane.
The errors started at about 10:30 p.m. on Dec. 9, the Air Force reported. The B-52 was practicing a nuclear bombing run, flying at about 300 miles per hour and descending rapidly from 29,000 feet to 8,000 feet while banking steeply. The wings went past vertical.
Capt. Ronald Little, the navigator, feeling the strong acceleration forces, believed the plane was out of control. Without orders, he pushed the button of his ejector seat, which launched him out of the bottom of the plane.
The resulting noise and decompression made the pilot, Capt. William Combs, think the plane was breaking up. He flipped a pair of switches that flashed red at each crew member’s station, ordering them to eject. As the men ejected, Combs fought to regain control of the plane. Believing the bomber could not be saved, he ejected.
But Combs had managed to level the B -52 before he ejected. And so it flew, pilotless and crewless, until it had crossed Lake Champlain and struck that Vermont pasture.
The story didn’t end with the report. An airman was still missing and presumed dead. That assumption was proved tragically correct in July 1961, when a teenage fisherman stumbled upon Maheux’s remains in North Hudson, New York. His parachute was found next to him, unopened. A coroner determined that he had died of a skull fracture.
The crash site was almost unrecognizable when I visited it a decade ago. Like so much of Vermont’s farmland, the former pasture had become woods. I visited the site with Ed Orton and Tom Carty, who had been teenagers when they explored the area on the morning after the crash.
The deep furrow left by the B-52 was now hard to distinguish from other dips and rises in the rolling landscape. We searched in vain for half an hour before Carty gave a shout. He had uncovered a vein of wreckage over which the forest floor was growing.
Over the next 15 minutes, we unearthed a cable, a piece of riveted metal, a wide strip of rubber and clumps of the chaff that had looked like tinsel on the morning after the crash. Whatever else remained of the old B-52 was now, like memories of the crash itself, mostly buried.
Note: I am indebted to Brian Lindner of Waterbury, a researcher with a particular interest in aviation history, who shared his research on the B-52 crash with me. He also shared a photo he took of Sue Maheux, widow of Pierre Maheux, and her children when he visited the crash site with them in 2019.
